There are two main purposes for assessments in schools, assessing for learning, and assessing for NCEA qualifications. Assessing for learning allows the teacher to ascertain the students’ skills in respect to the key competencies and learning objectives.
Assessments can be diagnostic, formative, or summative and form an important part of the teaching as inquiry process. Assessment tasks should require students to demonstrate their understanding of legal concepts through their application to specific issues and case studies.
Assessing for qualifications measures whether the students have met a specific range of performance criteria and have therefore attained credits towards their NCEA qualifications. NCEA assessments exist alongside the New Zealand Curriculum and are not designed to be a comprehensive tool for assessing a student’s knowledge at any given level.
Indeed, NCEA assessments will sometimes only assess a small part of what a student has learned. Whilst the same assessment task can sometimes be used in assessing for learning and in assessing for qualifications, this is not a requirement and may or may not be desirable depending on the circumstances.
At NCEA levels 2 and 3, specific legal studies unit standards are available for the purposes of assessment for NCEA qualifications (these are to be reviewed in the next cycle). However, teachers are not limited to these standards when planning a programme of NCEA assessment and may wish to choose standards from alternative domains. This is essential when planning a programme of NCEA assessment at NCEA Level 1 where no specific legal studies standards exist.
In particular, the current NCEA assessment environment encourages students to aim for course endorsements at merit or excellence level, and/or general NCEA level endorsements.
In order to cater for these students, teachers may wish to use NCEA achievement standards from alternative domains to assess their legal studies courses.
Last updated August 28, 2012